The First Time You Never Forget

Hello Wiki Ninjas!Luigi Bruno is here today for his first appointment to introduce himself and share some thoughts on “his” Wiki with you. Let’s go!

Who am I?

I'm a computer enthusiast from the South East of Italy, who started his "computer life" in 1982 using a Sinclair ZX-Spectrum computer with 16KB(!) of RAM. I've improved my experience and knowledge by learning more and more about programming languages, operating systems and technologies (I'm actually going to get graduate in Computer Science Engineering) and a few months ago I entered the Microsoft Italian Answers Forums; after posting a question and giving myself the answer (yes, it was really so), I walked through the Answers,TechNet and MSDN Forums trying to answering to some other questions. Someone noticed my contributions and I was asked to provide more information about me to enter the MVP evaluation process (which should be actually still running); meanwhile, I was awarded with the Microsoft Community Contributor Award on June the 28th.

A few months ago I've started to contribute to the TechNet Wiki: at first, I've filled in some stub pages (most of which created by the "Non-Invisible Wiki Ninja" Ed Price) and Ed Price rated my contributions very well, asking me to join the Wiki Ninjas as a blog author: what an honor! My contributions have increased and you can see them in the Wiki; one of the most appreciated and useful one seems to be the "Non-English Language Content Guidelines" (that I wrote after commenting on the Bruno Lewin's article “Microsoft Translator Widget and Wiki”, which made me being introduced to Bruno and to Yuri Diogenes by Ed), that has been chosen as the official guidelines set for writing articles in other languages (a very useful step on the way to enlarge the TechNet Wiki community).

Being featured three times in Blog’s posts, having an article considered as an official set of guidelines, being added as an author to this blog…WOW!

Thanks for welcoming me here!

Localization

As you know, I'm trying to contribute to the Italian localization of the Wiki, and I've started translating all of my articles in both the languages I can speak (as Yuri Diogenes wrote in his last Friday’s post ”TNWIKI International Update – some words from Italy and Brazil”: thanks again, Yuri). My current challenge is the translation of the "Wiki: Development Portal" page: sometimes is not so easy to provide a good translation, there are so many words that sound bad in Italian, many resources are not localized and…I wonder if there are other Italian contributors that can help me and the Community! Where are you? Hurry up and translate with me!

A final remark: when writing a new article or translating an existing one, I want to emphasize the importance of including the string representing the language code (refer to the section “Title and Tags List” in the “Non-English Language Content Guidelines” article, as usual) both at the end of the article’s title and in the tags list (the complete list is provided by tonysoper_MSFT’s article “Wiki: Non-English Language Title Guidelines”); I also suggest you to start using the new “Multi Language Wiki Articles” (many thanks again to Ed for this helpful idea), to indicate that an article is also available in more than one language.

I’m giving you two reasons not to forget it (quoting the article mentioned above):

“…(1) This will help the users of the Community to quickly find articles by performing a search based on the language the article could be written in (or click the tag to see all the article on TechNet Wiki in that particular language). (2) When we create an instance/version of TechNet Wiki devoted to that language, we'll want to migrate all the articles in that language. This tagging system makes that possible.”

You know, accuracy is always useful.

A modest proposal

Wiki is about knowledge and sharing knowledge: most of the topics we're talking and writing pages about come from our day-by-day experience, from documentation, from the Internet and from...books!In my (modest, until now) Wiki contributor experience I did not see many references to books (almost all of my Wiki pages, brand new or not contain links to books from which I've learned something about the topic I'm writing about) and I wonder: why not talking about books relating them to how useful they have been in writing Wiki articles?

Why not creating a sort of "Wikiers Recommend Reading..." page or a kind of “Wikiers’ Bookshelf" (this could be the name for a new portal page too) that could list books that Wiki contributors rated useful in making their pages or in contributing to pages created by someone else? Think about it and provide me with your feedback: I’ll create the page immediately!

Did you read a book that was useful for writing a page or contributing to a page? Do you think it could be useful for sharing knowledge (one of the Wiki pillars)? Quote it! Write a Wiki article talking about the book, say why that book was useful for your article(s), what you've learned, why you think that book could be important for the Community.

I've almost finished writing my first Wiki-like book review (I don't want to say the book's title yet: surprise!) and publish it: it includes some value-added contents, as you’ll soon see.

Spam

This is just a simple note: I cannot believe there is spam here and I wonder why! The funniest thing I've read about those pages were the comments:"Buy an XBox!", "Go out for a walk!", "Nothing better to do?".

I dare to suggest another one (in the view of the Wiki, of course):”Why don’t you create a stub page?”. Not about spam, of course! 😉

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